Headscratchers / Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Warning: Spoilers!

New entries on the bottom.

Taking off the mask

• What was the point of Alejandro wearing a mask if he was just going to take it off?
  • In a word: Revenge. The person he killed was connected to the people who killed his family. He wanted his victim to know who was killing him and why; hence why he had him put on his glasses. Afterwards, he simply put the mask back on.

The Kidnapping Plot

• What was the point of the CIA kidnapping Isabel if they didn't know what they were going to do with her? Why wing it with a plot as serious and potentially dangerous as kidnapping a Cartel boss's daughter?
  • They weren't winging it with Isabel in the beginning. She was a test case to see how her father would retaliate against rival cartels in order to get her back and use that information to start playing the cartels against one another to start a war while exposing corrupt police and other government officials along the way. They were on their way to put Isabel in a holding facility in a rival cartel's territory (to see if her father would risk an invasion) when the Mexican Federal Police turn on them and plan falls apart. That's when Gillick and Graves begin improvising.

Mexican Federales a bit too trigger happy?

• The Mexican cops that were paid by Reyes to rescue Isabel, do it by... shooting high caliber machineguns and rockets at the convoy? One of the gunners even sprays at the humvee carrying their mark, what kind of rescue operation was that?
  • They might not have known which humvee she was in. Also, since they had to shoot into the humvees to mount a rescue, the best they could do was try to aim at the soldiers they could see in the vehicles.
    • A poor justification. Just imagine what Reyes would do to a paid-off Federale who "accidentally" shot his daughter. Firing area-effect weapons into the convoy would be a suicidal act.
    • The federales knew that the humvees were up-armored. The point of spraying the lead vehicle was to get the convoy to stop and allow the sicarios to attack from their right. Isobel would remain safely in the humvee while the sicarios do their work. All of which went off as they planned, but they didn't know about the drone overhead or that the operators were as good as they were.

New mission

• After the debacle of the Federales attacking the strike team, Graves is about to order the team to find the girl before they can exfiltrate back over the border. But Gillick offers to find her solo, and because of the mess Graves is later ordered to take out both Gillick and Isabel to clean up the US's involvement in the black op. How would events have transpired differently if the whole team had set out to find her?
  • If the team searched for Isobel together, now you have a black ops team several miles behind the Mexican border wanted for murdering an entire squad of police. Even if they find the girl, they'll probably get in a stand-off with more Mexican police and the military, ending in either a bloody shootout or a humiliating diplomatic mess. However fucked-up US-Mexican relations were after things went the way they did, it would have been a hell of a lot worse had the whole team remained behind.
  • I mean sure possibly, but on the other hand these are Special Activities Division operators. It seems more likely that they have the skills to evade detection by the Mexican authorities in the first place, before the chance of even having to weigh up their combat prowess vs the Mexicans' comes into play. Couldn't they for example jack a car under cover of being a cartel and use that to roam and search for her, or else just do it largely on foot much as Gillick did? I'm minded of a similar ploy by the SAS in the book Bravo Two Zero who apparently stole a car and were able to drive it through Iraq clandestinely until they got to a checkpoint and were then forced to engage (albeit aspects of the book's credibility have been brought into question, not sure if this was one of them). Of course, my hypothesis doesn't account for the possibility of Mission Control calling in and ordering them back over the border, with or without the girl.
  • Mexico is not Iraq and while killing enemy combatants in a warzone is to be expected, Mexican law enforcement officers are not supposed to be enemy combatants. The mission had gone seriously off the rails once the convoy was killed. Having the black ops team remain in Mexico would only lead to more engagements with Mexican authorities. Gillick remaining behind mitigates that risk and maintains deniability.

Ambiguous ending

• At the end when Gillick is taking Miguel under his wing as a sicario. Is he now a completely lone wolf, still completely disavowed from the CIA (if perhaps part of a cartel)? Or has he resumed his work with the US?